ActionResearch.Gestural'Freedom In', not mere 'Freedom from' or 'Freedom to'.
Nikos Stasinopoulos (PhD)
Education Business Consultant, Researcher on Political Identities, Political Ethics, Justice, Political Psychosocial Research, Policies Foresight, under psychoanalytical and phenomenological oriented research methods
#actionresearch #performance #democratic design #communitiesofpractice #Gestus
How Gestus applies in the participatory Action Research Design on behalf of enhanching Futures of Democracy? ARTO LEITINEN's upcoming paper on freedom is worth considering from our participatory action research and action foresight tools. Arto stresses the point that? important forms of freedom may be analyzable not only in terms of “freedom from” and “freedom to” but also in terms of the proposed category of “f r e e d o m ??i n”. It is one thing to be free to dance, and another thing to be free IN dancing; one thing to be free to lead a self-directed life and another thing to be free in leading a self-directed life; one thing to be free to relate to others as a moral or legal person, a family member, or a citizen, and another thing to be free in being related to others as a moral or legal person, a family member, or a citizen. Such freedom-in has two important facets: a relational one (constituted in one’s relations to others and institutions), and an agential one (consisting of the exercise or process of doing something), which come together in such “relational, processual states” as self-realization through social roles.
The ‘F r e e d o m? ?i ?n’ concept gives a more ‘gestural’ performative turn, and ?switches the frame of Jose Ramos’s? Action Foresight model for Action Research of emerging futures:
The ‘freedom in’ add on also ?outperforms Dwight Conquergood;s ?performative ethnography research participants four malfunctioning roles that inhibit dialogical performative transformation stance. A ‘genuine conversation’ of dialogical performance is not enough and adequate to transform the four kinds of inhibitions. ‘Freedom in’ is more than a cognitively oriented dialogue of meanings exchange like Dwight’s ?view bellow:
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The ‘freedom in’ add on could enrich the above action research methodology with a somewhat Brechtian performativity of VerfremdungsEffekt and Gestus:
It is worth mentioning that is not only G. Agamben ?who considers gesture as m e a n s? w i t h o u t ??e n d s, but also Judith Butler scrutinizes the role of “g e s t u r e” ?(Gestus) as it crosses between language and performance. She focuses on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of epic theater in Brecht, which brings language and performance together in some unexpected ways. Paths where the citational account of the speech act has consequences for how we think about forms of action that appear to be shorn of context, or even rip it up in the course of appearing. The gesture is an ethicall consequential decomposition of the speech act characteristic of epic theater and that shares certain features with the performativity of subjectivity transformation. G e s t u s for Brecht is a h i n t of a t r a n s f o r m a t i v e e n c o u n t e r with our social situation and not a total, closed static meaning and knowledge. It comprises signs, behaviours, communal expactations, a condensation of the social condition. It 'f e e l s t h e r o o m'. It is worth delving however into Judith Butler’s view on the issue here.
Performance studies have confirmed the crucial insight that all action requires support, and that even the most punctual and seemingly spontaneous act implicitly depends upon an infrastructural condition that quite literally supports the acting body. This idea of “support” is quite important not only for the re-theorization of the acting body it provides, but for the broader politics of the arts it defends, including its demand for institutional support. But “support” is also a key term for the politics of mobility. What architectural supports have to be in place for any of us to exercise a certain freedom of movement and assembly: are there not spaces and forms of social and material support necessary for collective action or acting in concert? In the same way that Austin illuminated howthe speech act depends upon its social conditions and conventions, we can also claim that performance more generally depends upon its infrastructural and social conditions of support. This bears implications for a general account of embodied and social action.
W h e n ??t r a d I t I o n a l ?s u p p o r t s ?f a l l ?a w a y , w h a t ??f o r m ?d o e s ?a c t I o n t a k e? This is a timely question as those suffering the devastating effects of precarity gather to oppose that condition. When the absence of infrastructural support becomes the very reason for action, and when we act ?precisely because there are inadequate forms of institutional support for the lives we are trying to live, how do we understand such action? How we f o r e s i g h t ?action under unpreceded new conditions? Perhaps action ?is “supported” by forms of solidarity that emerge among people who have lost their ground, or who feel that they are being asked to live without the kinds of traditional supports that lives require? On the one hand, if we maintain that infrastructure is necessary for human action, we help to debunk the idea that we each, individually, act only from our own strength and with our own power, that we are self-sufficient and self-motoring, and that social conventions and social institutions more generally do not provide necessary support for our actions. So we can, through this perspective, de-ratify forms of individualistic autonomy that consistently efface the social conditions required for efficacious action and livability.
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On the other hand, if we assume that such infrastructural conditions are necessary for action, we might inadvertently commit ourselves to the proposition that only those who are already supported can truly act; in that case, we fail to grasp how those who are deprived of adequate infrastructure can, and do, mobilize resistance to the imposed conditions of accelerating precarity and inequality. These latter forms of mobilization are what we have witnessed in the last few years as crowds gather to object to increasing social and economic inequality, to increased precarity.
Benjamin’s description of epic theater: “Quotation,” Benjamin writes, “involves the interruption of its context.” That distance from the original context is a precondition of quotability or citationality: there could be no citation without that distance, that break. Benjamin concludes that epic theater, which narrates deeds and engages in explicit commentary, is quotable, even marked and defined by its quotability. A character is constantly breaking out of the context of the play to speak didactically. But also, characters lift utterances from their functional purpose, and display them in quotable form. The citational dimension of speech arrests its effectivity. The where and when of a quotation is always, to some extent, lost when it emerges for the purpose of display; when the citation stands apart from its function, the everyday context is suspended, backgrounded, even lost, and so the quotation becomes a gesture, that is, a truncated form of action that has lost the context for its intelligibility.
Butler? stresses Benjamin’s reference to the problem of I n c o m p l e t e ?G e s t u r e s. Here, the gesture was understood as a kind of stalled action, one that could not quite become action, that was something less than a fully formed act. The gesture is meant to be extracted from the temporal flow of ordinary action, presented in relative isolation from what precedes and follows. Similarly, the gesture is no longer propped up by a taken-for-granted world, and so seems to have been deprived of its usual grounding in both temporal sequence and spatial context. For Brecht, this isolation and freezing of the gesture is meant to denaturalize the ways that bodily gestures follow from one another forming perceptual and practical unities in everyday life.
Gesture crystallizes the disjunction between what the body does and what is says. A certain unmasterable arbitrariness now characterizes the relation between what the body does and what the person says, suggesting that language and body go their own way. As a result, the gesture allegorizes the decomposition of the speech act understood as the embodied expression of a definite will. If we expect a body to perform its words in conformity with the oratorical standard of the speech act (the Roman word as deed, referenced by Hannah Arendt), its gestures mark and enact the impossibility of that particular coordination.
For Benjamin, Brecht offers another way of opposing the relaxed individual, for the “one” who follows what happens on the Brechtian stage is less an individual than a collective, one whose shared reaction is very different from the individual body gripped by spectacle, bound up with what it watches. His point is that neither relaxation nor fascination will do. If anything, the collective who watches, or the one who watches from the perspective of the collective, is “ungripped” by what she sees, taking in the action from a position of attentive consideration and, especially of “interest.” Those who follow have an interest in what they watch, but this takes two different but simultaneous, forms: when they are seized by what they see, the object is a form of action with which one identifies; the second way of seeing—attentive, considered, even critical—is what Benjamin calls performance. And so a distinction is introduced in this rather breathless paragraph between an action considered as the basis of identification and performance, bound up with critical attention. The distinction permits Benjamin to explain that an action can be tracked on the basis of one’s own experience—in which case we are not really differentiated from what we see, since identification and sympathy both fail to differentiate the one who watches from the action watched. Performance, however, is mounted by someone else, with the result that one’s own way of seeing is interrupted by another’s way of seeing; it implies a director whose deliberate forms of orchestration are considered “pellucid.”
Through this deliberate orchestration, we are constituted as a “we” who are implicated together in what we see, and, as this very plurality, it would appear that we become capable of attentive and critical thinking. That once rapt body that was, it seems, associated with spectacle and sensation, is put out of play. Indeed, to the extent that epic theater takes historical events as its subjects, its point is “intended to purge them of the sensational.” For Benjamin, the “event” will be related to the gesture; in the place of sensational absorption, critical attention focuses on that incomplete or fragmented form of action deprived of its traditional supports. Indeed, Benjamin tells us that the gesture has become the event.
What constitutes “the truly epic process” must have to do with a de-sensationalized and thoughtful relation to the course of historical events, one that Benjamin will call “critical.” It must center on events rather than on outcomes, and, in this way, is distinguished from tragic drama which, it seems, relies on a suspenseful sequence of action and locates its meaning in the ultimate human destiny to which it leads. When an action is incomplete, or treated separately from any consequence, it becomes for Brecht an occasion for the audience to recognize itself as a collective. The action does not belong to one character, and it seems to act quite apart from the character to whom it is ascribed. At one point, Benjamin writes, this collective thinker in Brecht is not dissociable from the action but constitutes, n fact, “the hero of the drama.”
The action may be the hero, but it is also, separated from consequences, an event; as partial and decontextualized, it is also a gesture. The scene is orchestrated by a strong directorial agency, and this is what allows think ing to take place. Performance is not only an individual act, but the name for this directorial agency’s orchestration of the action as hero, as gesture, and as event. Thinking starts to take place under contemporary social and economic conditions, when actions are displaced from their usual contexts, from a naturalized understanding of everyday life, from their traditional supports. Indeed, the thinking audience is jolted from the natural attitude through a series of interruptions. One might say that the conventional context for an action is interrupted and that, for Brecht, such aninterruption leads to “astonishment” (Erstaunen) in the face of the normalized and naturalized circumstances under which everyone lives and works. Those circumstances are, for instance, the historical conditions of work that are exposed and delineated precisely through the presentation of events that are frozen or decontextualized in certain ways, removed from what passes as “the natural” and “ordinary” flow of existence. In effect, the deliberate task of the director is to educate the audience to be astonished, disposed toward a critical astonishment toward which it has no “natural” or immediate inclination. This astonishment about the historical conditions under which they live and work is the specific “performance” of epic theater, what distinguishes it from Aristotelian “action.” To undergo this astonishment, and to “see” or “behold” these conditions of life, one cannot start with identification or empathy or rapt attention; on the contrary, one starts with Verfremdung; one is startled by Verfremdung, a sense of alienation from those conditions that become astonishingly there to see, as if for the first time. They become graspable, though, only through a de-historicization, a break or rupture of such a kind that these conditions can no longer be contextualized–all these making them historically understandable. They break out of the continuity of history, we might say, and the naturalized understanding of social relations.
What about the case of the performativity of violent acts? Benjamin’s directorial act that pulls the breaks, but it may also be a felicitous effect: the gesture to take us into and out of ordinary scenes of violence without quite allowing for their commission, stopping violence, as it were, at the moment before the anticipated deed. The g e s t u r e, ?t h e n, f u n c t I o n s ?a s ?t h e ?p a r t I a l ?d ec o m p o s I t I o n ?o f t h e ?p e r f o r m a t I v e ??t h a t ??a r r e s t s ?a c t I o n ??b e f o r e ?I t ??p r o v e s ?l e t h a l. Perhaps this kind of stalling, cutting, and stopping establishes an intervention into violence, an unexpected non-violence through an indefinite stall, one produced by interruption and citation alike. In other words, the multiplication of gestures makes the violent act citable, brings it into relief as the structure of what people sometimes do, but does not quite do it—relinquishing the satisfaction of the complete act in a textual break which produces an ethos of restraint.
F r e e d o m I N G e s t u s, a s a f o r e s i g h t i n g t r a n s f o r m a t i o n a l ge s t u r e of o u r p e r f o r m a t i v e m a t r i x ?
W h a t i s t h e e n g a g i n g G e s t u s (which comprises signs, behaviours, communal expactations, sustainable condensation of the social condition) that d e c o n s t r u c t s t h e t h e a t r i c a l i t y o f p o w e r and h o p e f u l l y a l l i e n a t e s us of smoothly r e p e t i n g our mistakes in times of, let's say, climate change?
To better cupture the above, check also Butler here:
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